Are Indonesia and Malaysia Ready to Stand up for China’s Muslims?
The two Southeast Asian states might be the best hope for pressure from the Islamic world.
Nithin Coca, The Diplomat
By now, the scale of the crisis is clear. There are up to 3 million Turkic Muslims – primarily Uyghurs but also ethnic Kazakhs and Kyrgyz – in a vast network of concentration camps in China’s far western region of Xinjiang. The result is the 21st century’s greatest human rights crisis: Empty Uyghur neighborhoods. Students, musicians, athletes, and peaceful academicsjailed. “Graduates” of these camps are being put into forced labor factories, churning out goods that are even reaching the United States.
It’s clear that what began as a movement to clamp down on terrorism has become an attempt to eradicate an entire ethnic group and their religion – Islam, which is being seen as a mental illness and incompatible with Chinese-style socialism. Yet, so far, the world’s reaction has been muted – including in the Islamic world, in the same countries where, in the past years, there have been widespread protests and public statements in support of the human rights of Palestinian and Rohingya Muslims.
“I don’t know what they are waiting for,” said Omer Kanat, director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project in Washington, DC. “All the evidence shows that a crime against humanity is being committed by the Chinese government in East Turkestan,” he added, using the Uyghur’s preferred name for Xinjiang.
While many are looking toward the Middle East, Turkey, or China’s neighboring Muslim-majority nations of Pakistan and Kazakhstan as possible leaders, the best hope for pressure from the Islamic world may come from an unlikely place: Southeast Asia, namely, Malaysia and Indonesia.
Why Southeast Asia
They key factor is that, even though Southeast Asia’s two Muslim-majority countries have limited historical, cultural, or linguistic ties to the Uyghurs, they are both democracies that are responsive to public pressure, unlike most other Muslim majority nations. They also have a freer press that has allowed for more coverage of what’s happening in China – and that coverage is, slowly, increasing.
“In mainstream Indonesian press since mid-December or so, when it became a topic of debate in Parliament, there has been more coverage,” said Aaron Connelly, research fellow for Southeast Asian politics and foreign policy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “And Malaysians have been reading about what has been going on Xinjiang even more frequently than Indonesians.”
In fact, in both countries, there are early signs that the Uyghur issue is gaining traction. Malaysia has been standing up to China more and more, canceling several joint projects since the Pakatan Harapan coalition took power earlier this year. This might soon translate to human rights issues. A telling moment came earlier this year, when likely future Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim spoke publicly in support of Uyghurs, making him one of the first Muslim political leaders anywhere in the world to do so. The government even followed up rhetoric with action, letting a groups of Uyghur asylum seekers go to Turkey rather than be deported to China, despite the latter’s protests, and reversing the policy of the previous government.
“We took a strong stand on human rights, and it says a lot about our new government,” said Ahmad Farouk Musa, the director of the Malaysian nongovernmental organization Islamic Renaissance Front. “There was no valid reason for us to deport the asylum seekers back to China, because if we sent them to China, we are sending them the gallows.”
